This understanding is what eventually produced the collaborative research programs — the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub, the various traditional subsistence management programs — that now formally integrate Indigenous knowledge with scientific monitoring.

Rather than extracting Indigenous knowledge to use without credit, these programs recognize the knowledge holders as partners and maintain the community structures that keep the knowledge alive.

The Boarding School System And What Was Nearly Lost

Ada Blackjack’s separation from traditional Iñupiat knowledge was not an accident.

It was policy.

The United States government’s Indian boarding school system — which operated in Alaska as in the continental United States under various forms throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — was explicitly designed to sever Native children from their cultural inheritance.

The goal, as articulated by the system’s architects, was cultural replacement: to take Native children away from their communities, prohibit them from speaking their languages, and replace their Indigenous identity with something more compatible with the dominant culture’s vision of what they should become.